Lawrence Coburn's app maker DoubleDutch is rethinking the events business

The DoubleDutch app is said to be a game-changer for the $565 billion events industry. It allows organizers to collect engagement data from events and conferences, where before organizers were “running blind and making decisions on hunches and intuition,” said co-founder Coburn. He told the story of a large company that spent around $75,000 on a keynote speaker. Through the app, however, the company later discovered that the speaker was among the least popular parts of the event, based on sentiment and engagement scores.

“That company is going to save $75,000 next year when they do their events,” Coburn said.

DoubleDutch has worked on events for Cisco, Novartis, Salesforce and even the Girl Scouts. The software company hit a three-year growth rate of 1148 percent in 2014.

For Coburn, this is a dangerous place to be.

“Even if you’re growing really really fast, it’s just tough to live up to those promises,” he said.

For the record, DoubleDutch isn’t profitable, but Coburn is confident it will be.

“It’s the biggest thing to happen to events in the last hundred years,” said Jason Ray, chief technology officer at the Urban Land Institute, which throws roughly a thousand events annually. “They’re just beginning to unlock value that’s been elusive.”

Which means demand is high, Ray said.

“We’ll see the point where at any type of gathering, people are going to expect an app,” he said.

DoubleDutch’s first event was a TED event in Long Beach in 2011 when the company “barely had a working product,” Coburn recalled. “I don’t think we slept for 30 days.”

Coburn knows his company is now at a turning point. In February, DoubleDutch will be moving out of its “scrappy” office in the Mission District into larger space in Potrero Hill. The move has prompted soul-searching for Coburn:“How do you reconcile our scrappy, bootstrappy roots with the fact that we’re a global software company that’s not going away?”

Keys to success

Boring is the new sexy:“Find a category that’s under-competed that ideally has a big spend associated with it,” said Coburn.

Document your values early: If a company begins growing fast, it can be difficult to hold onto its soul.

The power of focus:“If you have a bunch of ideas that you’re floating out there, eventually you’ll have to take a bet on one or you’ll be diluted,” said Coburn.